Expatria: The Box Set (23 page)

III

Square stone buildings jostled around her; five storeys, six, crowding her in. The day was grey and humid, the clouds and smog from Fos and Martigues a thick blanket overhead. She wore a light cotton jacket, paper-based once-over shirt and jeans and cheap plastic boots. Her neat company haircut had been gelled and tousled, the fashionable cheek-bone sideburns razored away, cosmetics layered on crudely. She could never achieve a genuine Old Port look without comprehensive retraining; all she could hope was that the corporate sheen had been successfully obscured by her efforts. She pulled the jacket loose and took a side-street off the Canebière. The Farceurs had relocated their encampment to the beach, having been moved on from the Place d'Accord the previous afternoon. She consulted her mind-map of the Old Port and felt suddenly grateful that this district had never been in the reconstructing-deconstructing state of flux that continually changed the street plan of the rest of Marseilles.

The Promenade had been painted green and red, smeared and muddied by the feet of the city's pedestrian population and the wheels of the street-cars. To one side of the road were long, low shop-fronts—coffee bars and food shops, Glory arcades where the unsaved could False-wIre their pleasure centres in crude mimicry of the believers' Maxing. A small band of menials chased along a side-street after a pack of dogs almost as big as themselves, keeping the city clean and maybe—if they had the wit, which was always questionable with these workaholic dwarves—selling the carcases on to the seafront food stalls.

Katya felt the city pressing in around her so she paused, leaning against the concrete bulwark, forcing her body to calm itself. Company life was treating her too kindly—she hadn't been out in the roughs like this for almost two years; she had restricted herself to the safe districts, the company strongholds. It took an excursion such as this to remind her just what proportion of the world was yet to be converted to the gospel of the Third Testament. And this was only
Europe
; Eurecon's government was little more than an administrative branch of GenGen, but elsewhere, away from the corporate theopoly, Company influence was less dominant. 'And only a thousand years,' she muttered, using the words as a soothing spell.

The Farceurs were easy to locate—the grim-faced mutterings of O-P's residents told their own stories and then, as she drew closer, there was the music, the increasing volume of human voice, the intensifying freshness of the vandalistic painting.

She saw them, spread out on the beach, a dense mass of bodies and shelters, more than there had been in the Place d'Accord.

Closer, she could see that only a small proportion were Farceurs, the rest were youths from the Old Port and perhaps the Panier, other travellers and anarchist bands, all congregating around this encampment of Painted Clowns. As she approached along the Promenade, her templar implants were in constant battle with her body's excited nervous system, keeping her calm, keeping her mind in synch.

She paused at a food stall and argued over the price of a canid patty. She checked herself in the responses of the vendor. His contempt told her that he had detected nothing untoward in her appearance so she bit into the tough meat of the patty, felt disgusted at the enthusiastic response of her gastric juices, and headed for the nearest ramp down to the beach.

Down here, among the bodies, among the tattered shelters and the hedonistic debris, the music had a strange buzz to it. It wormed into her brain and took hold, the atonal Arab twangs and rhythms suddenly coming together in a strange roll. As she walked, she let her body go with the sounds, made herself slot into the environment, be a part of it, like they had been taught in preactive training, like she had learnt for real in her early days in Order enforcement in other parts of the MedSpread, before she had come to Aix and the Bouches-du-Rhône.

She took her time, even though she could tell that this was all peripheral, she could sense the heart of the Farceurs' part of this encampment to be farther down the beach. But she could not let herself be seen to be too focused. The setting wouldn't allow that. She had to flow. She stood for a time with some Old Port traders, arguing at first about this invasion, sniffing from a shared bowl of crash; as the bowl's contents diminished, the group's antagonism shrank in step. Katya found it easy to blend in with these outsiders, allowing her body to clear out the crash from her blood before she could do more than anticipate its effects.

Finally she felt that it was time to approach the Farceurs, time to look for Vladi. Now, as she fought back her apprehension, she realised that she did not really know what she was doing here—her role in the Order Office did not require this kind of approach, she could only admit that it was the presence of Vladi that had brought her here. But what was she going to do? She shook her head and made for the Farceurs.

A small group was spread out at the top of the beach: eight Farceurs, in their war-paint and bright rags, three earnest-looking people in the simple clothing of one of the Consumerist factions, and a small number of locals, arguing with the Farceurs and the Consumerists, sharing Crash and alcohol with them, breaking off and giggling every so often.

Katya approached the group, settled on the fringe, just behind her brother and Lincoln Carter, the man from the Place d'Accord. Carter looked up and nodded at her, then nudged Vladi to bring his attention to this newcomer.

It was a terrible, quaking moment when Katya met the eyes of her brother for the first time in over twenty years. She could see herself reflected in the wide blacks of his pupils, see the nervous lick of her lips, the anxious, searching movements of her own eyes.

She smiled at him, said, 'Crash?' She indicated the bowl in his hand and reached out as he passed it over.

She inhaled deeply and delayed her nanomedical clean-up response for a moment too long. Vladi supported her as her dizzy spell subsided and she wondered desperately where her control had gone.

'We have a tradition, here in Marseilles,' one of the Consumerists was saying, her gestures exaggerated by crash and the red wine she was spilling. 'A tradition of independence! Yet the iron fist has been closed around our necks for more than forty years!'

'There is opposition,' said another, more sober. 'But it is spread out among Consumerist groupings and others and now you, the Farceurs. Our predecessors did not win the last of the Consumption Wars in order simply that we should let their triumph slip away.' Katya kept quiet. The Consumption Wars had lasted intermittently for three centuries—the coldest of all wars, the governments and the corporations had threatened and sabotaged but the posturing had only rarely erupted into large-scale combat. It had been a psychological war of attrition, a long period of stagnation. In Eurecon, a truce had been in effect for forty years: the bureaucrats had retained the power to govern but had surrendered all of the major Rebuild contracts, delivering themselves into an irreversible economic stranglehold. Theohistoricists argued that the war would have broken out again within years of the truce if it had not been for the revelations contained within the Third Testament and the rebirth of the Lord on Earth, the growing acceptance of the All's divine nature and the initiation of the Last Thousand Years. GenGen's new incarnation, the Holy Corporation, had been the phoenix born of the ashes of the Consumption Wars; the governments and the other corporations had been left in the Company's wake.

'No, no, nonono,' one of the local youths was saying through his giggles. 'Why oppose the Truth?'

The first Consumerist leapt to her feet and loomed over the youth. 'How can you say that?' she cried. 'There is no truth to what GenGen preach! Their words are just a device to secure power.' But there was doubt in her actions, in her expression; Katya recognised, again, the familiar fear of the Holy.

'There's more to truth than words,' said a Farceur. 'Not that I'm siding with the iron fist, of course.'

'There are visions and revelations and stuff,' said the youth.

'You know of such?' said the Consumerist in a patronising tone.

The youth wasn't paying attention—the crash bowl had just worked its way round to him and he didn't want to miss his turn.

Katya straightened, the evangelist in her sensing opportunity. 'I knew someone who had a vision,' she said, and a number of faces turned to her, some seeing her for the first time. Through peripheral vision she confirmed that she had Vladi's attention; she had to get him away from all this, she could sense that trouble was stirring here on the beach in the Old Port and she did not want her brother to suffer its consequences.

'We were living in a villa with friends.' They had been at a mission house in Montpellier. 'It was late in the night and we were a little drunk and the stars were bright above us, brighter than you'd ever see from Marseilles. My friend, Patrische, was depressed. He was a designer for a small company which had just been bought out and smashed by GenGen.' A nice touch: he had just engineered a GenGen takeover of a local chemical combine; the deal had provoked riots and a violent outbreak of sabotage and he had been feeling responsible for the bloodshed. She dared to look directly at Vladi, now, and he was watching, studying her intently. She continued: 'He had been a believer but his faith was crumbling and he was ranting drunkenly at me and our friends. People drifted away until there were only the two of us and then, suddenly, Patrische fell quiet and staring. I went to him but he shied away, said something about lights and voices. I thought it was the drink.' She paused for another hit of crash; she passed it to Vladi and clung to the bowl for a moment too long, so that he was focused on her, waiting for her release.

'What did he see?' asked Vladi.

'He saw the saints from the All: Saint Mel, Mother Tamsin, the Max himself. They spoke to him, urged him to keep faith, infused him with awe.'

'Electrical gimmickry,' said a Consumerist. 'Remote Free-wIring inducing hallucinations. Did he have implants? They could have tuned it to his implants.'

'I thought the same,' said Katya, quietly. 'I knew of the Corporation's powers to induce such visions. I went to him and held his hand and suddenly I was there with him, too, sensing the wonder of what he had been shown. I could feel that I was only a part of it—an outsider, a peripheral—but I could sense the scale of what Patrische was undergoing. It changed his—and my—entire outlook on life.'

'You caught the edge of the field,' said the Consumerist, and Katya suddenly realised the flaw in her story: she could not go on and tell them how she had known this vision to be something new, something
divine
, she could not explain that it was totally different in mood and energy to the company's everyday transmissions to an active's implants. She could not reveal her true nature, yet she would have to if she was to convince them of her story.

She looked at Vladi and she saw that at least she had held his attention. She smiled and shrugged, said, 'I know. There are explanations. There always are. But sometimes you can tell the difference... I can't explain.' She shook her head, slumped a little, let the focus of debate shift back to the centre.

'What are you going to do here?' she asked Vladi, desperate to keep his attention. 'You're new to this part of the Spread, I've never seen people like you before.' Without thinking she had reached out as she spoke and now her hand was on that of her brother.

He smiled, shook his long blond hair. 'We drift where we're allowed, we move on when we're moved. We make things interesting.'

'You have no political agenda?' She had assumed that the Farceurs were like all the fringe groups she had known before; it was difficult to understand a group that had no core of belief, particularly a group as renowned for chaos and sabotage as the Farceurs.

'So long as things are how they are who needs change? Things are loose, no matter what the police and the corps try to tell you. There are plenty of niches for freewheelers like us. Just have to keep on moving, that's all.'

Katya could barely contemplate such a meaningless existence. For a moment she despaired. Was Vladi truly damned? How could they spread belief in such a vacuum?

She had to try, that was all she knew.

'We have to be moving soon,' he said suddenly, and Katya noticed the increased activity on the beach, people standing and beginning to walk, climbing up onto the Promenade. 'Why don't you come with us, get those clothes of yours a bit grimy? Huh?'

She let him pull her to her feet. She felt an odd tingle as he hung on for longer than he needed, wrapping his long arms around her. It didn't feel right, and suddenly she realised how he saw her, what he must have in his mind.

'No, Vladi,' she murmured, pulling away. 'You don't understand.'

He let her move to a safe distance, but kept his arm around her waist, and they began to walk. Up on the Promenade, he stopped and let go and she knew that this was the time to tell him.

But he spoke first. 'You're not police, right? What are you? GenGen? No, you're too human. You're from one of their suck-up corps, one of the Twelve? Is that what you are?' He was still smiling—he was amused by the situation, not intimidated, not scared for his own survival as any normal person would be.

Katya stared at him, realised that she had used his old name and that he had spotted her error. She would never normally have made such a mistake.

'You'd better not come with us—if anyone else saw through you I couldn't make any guarantees.'

She had to tell him now, to whisk him away from this insanity, but he was looking down at her, studying her breasts through her paper shirt. 'Pity,' he said. 'In another life we could have been real close.' The leer in his look made her shudder and suddenly the moment had passed and he had turned and started to walk and her body was regaining control of itself, calming her down, making her straighten and turn and begin to head out of the Old Port to a mission house and some sanity. As she walked, she filed a report in her templar implants, careful to edit out any reference to her relationship with Vladi—they had no real relationship in any case. He was a grown man, she had offered him salvation, but now she could see so clearly that he was one of the damned, one of the tainted... she could no longer hold herself responsible for his fate. As she turned onto the Canebière she finished her report and prompted its transmission via a nearby police drone; she had done what she could, the data was in the possession of the Company, now, the future was in the hands of the All.